There Is Nothing in My Language
These days
there is nothing in my language
except barbaric pessimism.
People are living in old memories
of food and fruit.
When they are tired of their growing nails and eyebrows,
they go to the barber shops,
wash their violently curled hair,
shave away their blood-stained guilt
of the atrocities of the past.
Is this the reason
that gods are also bald?
The streets are lined with burnt palash trees
and silence shining like the wheels of tanks,
insisting on forgetting.
Aging fakirs are selling the light of their eyes
to patients with cataracts.
I don't go anywhere
these days,
only look at my horoscope
once, twice.
And shiver in the fragrance
of parts of my body
rotting in the growing darkness of my room.
Her Name, the Most Beautiful Word
Her name is the most beautiful word
I have hidden in my flesh.
When I say it, her dark, lustful eyes grow larger
in the twilight; thunder awakens us—
her body indecent, foreign—
and I leap from my past into a predetermined wonder.
Soon we take turn like
nomads
in an orchid-lit sanatorium;
she begins frisking my verses,
inhaling their fragrance as if it were her own.
.
Is it anecdotal, or a forgotten future?
Slowly, her strawberry nipples melt
like pomegranate rainbow in my famished mouth.
Somewhere between the twin clock towers,
the city forgets its own name,
even the last traces of its vulgar memory—
and I simply smile at my own mendicant image;
she writes her own name everywhere.
I Can't Decolonize Myself
The forest is just
next door.
These
days, I hear
birds die without pain,
without
fear, without bitterness.
I am confined to my Jalsha
ghar*,
alone with the furniture of silence,
rubbing
her nail polish
from the walls.
Is it true
that mortality is such a cruel experience—
like writing your
own biography
with a hand that has already disappeared?
There are no wounds
on my body,
yet something inside me is bleeding,
like
sugar syrup in open drains.
Perhaps music has
become
a poison of my past.
Slowly,
I barricade myself
against the fading light from my flesh.
The night begins to
rain
like rejected lemonade.
The earth tastes
sour.
I can't
decolonize myself in her absence.
*Jalsha
Ghar (The Music Room) is a film by the legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
Author’s
Bionote:
there is nothing in my language
of food and fruit.
they go to the barber shops,
wash their violently curled hair,
shave away their blood-stained guilt
of the atrocities of the past.
that gods are also bald?
and silence shining like the wheels of tanks,
insisting on forgetting.
to patients with cataracts.
only look at my horoscope
once, twice.
of parts of my body
rotting in the growing darkness of my room.
I have hidden in my flesh.
When I say it, her dark, lustful eyes grow larger
in the twilight; thunder awakens us—
her body indecent, foreign—
and I leap from my past into a predetermined wonder.
in an orchid-lit sanatorium;
she begins frisking my verses,
inhaling their fragrance as if it were her own.
.
Is it anecdotal, or a forgotten future?
like pomegranate rainbow in my famished mouth.
Somewhere between the twin clock towers,
the city forgets its own name,
even the last traces of its vulgar memory—
and I simply smile at my own mendicant image;
she writes her own name everywhere.
birds die without pain,
alone with the furniture of silence,
from the walls.
that mortality is such a cruel experience—
with a hand that has already disappeared?
yet something inside me is bleeding,
a poison of my past.
I barricade myself
against the fading light from my flesh.
like rejected lemonade.
*Ashwani Kumar is a prominent Indian poet, political scientist, and professor. Widely published, anthologized, and translated into several Indian and international languages, his poetry collections include “My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter”, “Banaras and the Other”, and “Map of Memories”. He has recently edited “Rivers Going Home”, “Scent of Rain: Remembering Jayanta Mahapatra”, and “Songs of River”, significant anthologies of contemporary Indian poetry. A selection of his poems has appeared in Hungarian translation as “The Architecture of Alphabets”. He is also the author of the acclaimed nonfiction book “Community Warriors” (Anthem Press, London). His forthcoming poetry collection is titled “Loss of Ordinary Things” (2027). He served as one of the chief editors of “Global Civil Society” at the London School of Economics and is co-editor of “Migrants, Mobility and Citizenship in India” (Routledge). He is the co-founder of the Indian Novels Collective, an initiative dedicated to popularizing translations of classic Indian novels, and curates the “Hummingbirds Chapbook” poetry series with Red River. He has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, the University of Heidelberg, the Korean Development Institute, the University of Sussex, and the University of Indianapolis, among others. His essays and columns have appeared in the “Financial Express”, “Outlook India”, “Indian Express”, “The Hindu”, “Scroll”, “The Print”, and other publications. Presently, he is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.